The Salsa café in Stockport that "doesn't do small portions" and sells out very quickly

27-year-old Luis Sanjuan is from Barranquilla, in the north of Columbia, though his accent now has more than a hint of the Stopfordian about it. Barranquilla has the second biggest carnival in the world after Rio, and every year for four days before Lent, the city descends into chaos, with sound systems in every doorway and celebratory carnage in the streets.

“The whole city collapses,” he grins. “The King and Queen of the carnival read out a decree telling everyone to stop working, stop caring about their bosses, their companies, start drinking, staying out late. There are no buses, no taxis, no one works. It’s not a national holiday, but everyone in the city knows that no one is going to turn up for work.”

He jokes that when he ventured into Stockport for the first time 10 or so years ago, when he was studying at Stockport College, it had an air of downtown Barranquilla about it. But not necessarily the carnival side of things.

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The neighbourhood has changed some since then. With the continued success of the market and the Produce Hall opposite, not to mention the buzz around the reanimation of Little and Great Underbank, Stockport’s clearly not what it was a decade ago and next week, Luis’s first restaurant, Cafe Sanjaun, will have been open for a year.

On that first weekend that the doors opened in 2021, he threw a party and made Lechona, a whole pig, deboned and stuffed with